Le Jardin des caresses. Traduit de l'arabe, consisting of Toussaint’s interpretation of Moorish poems, partly anonymous, written in tenth-century Spain, first appeared serially in the Mercure de France and Revue de Paris in 1909-1911, then published together in 1911 and reprinted and translated in numerous editions throughout the twentieth century (the Golden Cockerel Press printed an English edition in 1934). Its numerous short stanzas, whose titles include: ‘Les Seins, les yeux, et la chevelure’, ‘Les oiseaux de la mosquée’, ‘La Sultane de l’amour’, ‘Al Maghreb’, ‘Les Sorciers’, ‘L’Astronome’ and ‘La Volupueuse’proved especially suitable for musical settings and so the work also found huge popularity in song.

Toussaint is an interesting figure, both a respected scholarly translator of Arabic and other eastern languages, and a director of silent films, the best-known of which is Inch’Allah of 1922. This appealing little manuscript was evidently made by the author as a gift for his second wife, Turkish-born Adelaïde Etelca Stefania Braggiotti, who he married in 1925. .see full details

First and only complete collected edition, a superb and handsome set completed with 2 volumes of Cook’s ‘Life of Ruskin’ (1911) uniformly bound (41 vols in all).more...

‘The edition was the outcome of twelve years work by Edward Tyas Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, although Cook completed the bulk of the editing. The aim of The Library Edition was to provide the complete works of Ruskin, both literary and artistic, in uniform volumes. The edition was undertaken by Messrs. George Allen, Ruskin's publishers. Illustrated by 820 wood blocks and 990 full-page plates with 120 facsimiles of MSS., the edition includes 269 plates of Ruskin's own drawings of which 200 had never before been published. Portraits of Ruskin are used as frontispieces to some of the volumes. The press work was carried out by Messrs. Ballantyne of Edinburgh, and the weight of type amounted to nine tons, whilst the printing ink weighed 1800lbs. Printed on hand-made, linen rag paper (about 87tons) with a double watermark of Ruskin's monogram and seal. The edition consisted of 2062 sets, of which 2000 were available for sale to subscribers for the full set. The first volume was published on 27 March 1903. George Allen did not live to see the completion of the edition dying on 5 September 1907, his children taking over the firm ... Cook and Wedderburn provide the standard reference work for Ruskin studies.’ (from the University of Lancaster’s Preface to their electronic edition).

‘The apogee of Ruskin's immediate influence was marked by the decision to publish a monumental Library Edition of his complete works in thirty-nine volumes, edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, which appeared between 1903 and 1912. Although biographically reticent and presenting a liberal version of Ruskin (as did Cook’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography), this became the foundation for future Ruskin scholarship’ (Oxford DNB)..see full details

A DELIGHTFUL BOOK, CERTAINLY ONE OF THE MOST CHARMING FRENCH MANUSCRIPTS WE HAVE ENCOUNTERED, A COLLECTION OF FAMILY SONGS AND ENTERTAINMENTS COMPOSED OVER A PERIOD OF 20 YEARS to 1808, memorialising a deep and sentimental friendship between two families with young daughters.more...

The compiler, Césaire Delaplanche and his wife Marie Adelaïde (Adèle), produced three daughters: Virginie, Heloïse and Pauline and father Césaire encouraged them to mark family occasions in song, a tradition which lasted at least the 20 years charted by the manuscript. The hundreds of original songs here were composed by the girls (presumably with their father’s help) for birthdays, New Year celebrations, feast days, weddings, visits, reunions and suppers and for recording gifts (an embroidered purse and tobacco case are mentioned), in honour of tutors, or in memory of deceased relations and friends. Each verse is transcribed in full, headed with the name of the popular tune to which they were sung: Femmes, voulez-vous éprouver?, Femme Sensible Entendre-tu le ramage, Pauvre Jaques, Sous les auspices de l’Hymen, to name but a few.

The story told by the manuscript is not without sadness. The death of the Delaplanche girls’ mother in 1805 drew the remaining family closer to their friends M. and Mme Loiseau and their daughter Julie. Indeed the book seems to be largely a homage to the kindness of the Loiseaus to the bereaved Delaplanches around that time, beautifully expressed in the allegorical frontispiece. Three young girls, Amitié, Estime and Reconnaissance (corresponding to Virginie, Heloïse and Pauline Delaplanche) offer a red book, La Clef des coeurs, to a bird (Loiseau) perched in a tree, who accepts it and takes the girls to a marble pavilion, the Temple du Bonheur & de la Vertu.

The verses are simple, sentimental and affecting, extolling the virtues of familial love and respect and reflecting the proverbial strength of filial respect in French society. One particular entertaiment, Hommage à la Reconnaisance. Ou Combat entre l’amitié & l’amour filiale, is emblematic of the manuscript as a whole, in expressing the gentle tension between friendship and family love. The songs are in no way pious, and the relative absence of religious imagery is striking. In fact, the impingement of the outside world on this subtle family drama is only lightly felt, and then only in ghosts of the French Imperial presence. The orderliness of the manuscript is disturbed in two places, tellingly. Seven leaves are cut out after p. 232, with the Index indicating that these contained a Chanson en l’honneur de l’Empereur (the Index entry itself is erased at an early date), while two further leaves (pp. 433-436) are on different paper, clearly substitutions, which bear another version of a chanson dedicated to Napoleon.

The implied narrative of the collection is brought to a close in 1808 with the engagement of Julie, the Loiseau daughter to a M. Dupézard. The two are married in October, accompanied by family songs and verses, in which the young groom is expected to participate (several of the last songs are his), and the manuscript closes with a valedictory poem by Césaire Delaplanche: ‘Il est fini mes bons amis...’.see full details

A SPECTACULAR AND ECCENTRIC BRITISH ANTIQUARIAN COLLECTION WITH NOTICES OF OVER 100 HISTORIC INDIVIDUALS OR MONUMENTS, EACH WITH A WATERCOLOUR AND ILLUMINATED TEXT, the latter in quasi-historical style evoking original manuscripts.more...

With a very few exceptions (Ignatius Loyola and Marie de Medici included) the subjects are British historical figures, beginning with William de la Way who came to England at the Conquest. Leveland provides watercolour portraits of each in an engagingly naive style, together with short biographies and armorial devices. Other figures include Robert Despenser, John de Pelham, William de la More, Henry Courtenay, Thomas Howard, Henry Howard, Anthony Woodville, Francis Villiers, William ‘Alderman’ Beckford (father of the novelist and collector), Nicholas Carew and Robert De Vere, among many others. The work is dedicated to Queen Charlotte, though probably without permission: ‘This Volume of Miscellaneous Antiquities is Humbly presented for her Gracious Patronage’ with her arms; the second volume contains an incomplete dedication to Charles Howard, Duke of Norfolk (1746-1815) following his full-page arms.

At the end of the first volume several pages are devoted to contemporary hero, Admiral Lord Nelson, with examples of his arms granted after the Battle of the Nile (1798) and the commemorative medal struck in the same year by Alexander Davison. The second volume is more diverse. While continuing the biographies of the first, it also contains entries on specific monuments, notably the churches at Fairford (Gloucs) with its celebrated early stained glass, St Michael (Crooked Lane, London) and Stoke Poges (Bucks.); a calligraphic facsimile (with seals) of the death warrant of Charles I and copy of the Institution of the Baronets of Nova Scotia (1629).

The style is certainly idiosyncratic, the highly-coloured figures rendered with limited attention to proportion or perspective accompanied by naturalistic illuminated borders of leaves, fruit and flowers sometimes inhabited by insects and a range of historical scripts and other apparatus (armorial devices, seals and frames). The coloured portraits of the artist in wig and cravat bound at the front of each volume are etchings with aquatint and were presumably privately commissioned; an uncoloured version with full margins is in the print collection of the British Museum.

Little is known of Clifford (1736-1815) but he was baptised at St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden on 19 October 1736, second son and fourth child of Gervase Leveland, a London woollen-draper, and his wife Mary [Nutting]. He was a longtime Suffolk resident and created several antiquarian manuscripts; one (‘Auncient seles affixede to Charteres’) is now in the National Art Library (Victoria & Albert Museum), three more are in the William Salt Library (Stafford) and another is in a private collection. A book bearing his inscription, Barclay his Argenis, or, The Loves of Poliarchus and Argenis (1625) is at UCL and his will is preserved in the National Archives (it makes specific provision for the inheritance of Leveland’s painting materials). He managed at least one foray into print with The virtuous Wife: a sentimental Tale (Sudbury, privately printed, 1812)..see full details

An idiosyncratic personal index of useful and curious facts, mainly geographical, in part forming an index to the Encyclopédie Méthodique (which had been issued in print without an index), a gazetteer to its Atlas, and an index to various other books, such as Valmont de Bomare’s Histoire Naturelle and Lacroix’s Géographie.more...

A homespun affair, the volume is rather haphazardly arranged and presented in homemade boards covered in rather fine contemporary wallpaper. It includes references to regions, cities and landmarks in Europe, Asia, Africa and America (the latter including mentions of Cabot, Columbus and Penn) and several ingenious diagrams of the rivers of France..see full details

A splendid display of early nineteenth-century Chinese trades including craftspeople, a bookseller, purveyors of foods, medicines, fans, kites, toys and even a lion dancer, each drawing on one side of fine double-folded paper, captioned in ink in Chinese.more...

Albums such as these were produced in Chinese studios for the export market and were especially popular with Europeans for their exact portrayal of various aspects of Chinese life of the period: customs, costumes, occupations, flora and fauna. They ‘depicted those phases of Chinese life which fascinated the Westerner but defied descriptions to friends and family at home. Before the advent of the camera, this medium played an extremely vital role in revealing Oriental culture to the West.’ (Crossman, The China Trade, 1972). Though marketed to curious Europeans these albums represent important interpretations of Chinese life by indigenous Chinese artists. The present example is notable for being dated 1843, at the very end of the First Opium War just as five ports in China were being opened to the British.

These albums were luxury products, each one individually produced, and therefore priced beyond the means of any but the wealthy. Individual artists were never identified.

Lady Churchill, the original owner of the album, was born Lady Frances Fitzroy, the fifth daughter of Augustus Henry Fitzroy, third duke of Grafton. In 1801 she married Francis Almeric Spencer, youngest son of the fourth Duke of Marlborough and created first Baron Churchill of Wychwood in 1815. It is unlikely that the elderly Baron Churchill and his wife were in China at the time she received the album, and much more probable that it was presented to Lady Churchill in England as a gift, possibly by one of her military sons such as George Augustus Spencer, who was an officer in a regiment serving in China..see full details

First edition, bound in red morocco with Napoleonic emblems by Rosa, who together with Bizouard, Bozerian, Tessier, Simier, Lefebvre and Doll, supplied bindings for the Imperial household.more...

Written under the encouragement of the First Consul this is an important work in defining the purpose of modern diplomacy. Flassan was (like Napoleon) a product of the École militaire de Paris and served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before becoming professor of history at the military school at Saint Germain-en-Laye.see full details

A commemorative volume (’Not for Publication’) issued to accompany the Nepalese Prime Minister’s visit to HMS Dreadnought on exercise in the English Channel.more...

The superb photographs depict: The Dreadnought, a submarine (4 plates: beached; on the surface; in the act of diving; submerged), a torpedo boat destroyer (2 plates: ‘going 30 knots’, ‘going 36 knots’). The Nepalese deputation witnessed a demonstration of firing from the Dreadnought and of the deflection of torpedoes with its safety nets. Dreanought, pride of the British navy, launched in 1906 was a revolutionary battleship which stimulated the Anglo-German arms race and gave its name to an entire class of heavily armoured craft. It was widely publicised as part of British naval propaganda and shown-off to numerous foreign visitors. The Nepalese Prime Minister was the Maharaja Sri Teen Chandra Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana (1863–1929), one of three nephews who had ordered the assassination of their uncle Maharaja Ranodip Singh Kunwar in the Nepali coup of 1885.

Two years later, Dreadnought was at the centre of an embarrassing episode in which several members of the Bloomsbury Group (including Virginia Woolf) led by Horace de Vere Cole masqueraded as an Abyssinian royal party on a similar state visit, inspecting the ship in full costume, talking among themselves in Latin and Greek and exclaiming ‘Bunga Bunga!’ at every appropriate opportunity. They narrowly escaped arrest..see full details

First edition of this work on the early history of the University of Pisa.more...

Though a little younger than the University of Bologna, the university at Pisa is one of the oldest in Europe, with origins in the city’s eleventh-century law school. Its importance to the early history of European law lay in part in its custody of the oldest surviving manuscript of Justinian’s Pandects, which it kept until it was taken by the Florentines at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Pisa attracted many lawyers in the eleventh century (prominent among them were Opitone and Sigerdo) while no less than four professors of the Bologna law school (Bulgarus, Burgundio, Uguccione, and Bandino) were educated there.

Borgo, who published a separate work on the Pandects manuscript the previous year (Dissertazione sopra l’istoria dei Codici pisani delle Pandette di Giustiniano imperatore, Lucca 1764), here traces the origins of the university as a law school long before Papal recognition was granted in the fourteenth century.

Borgo was born and educated at Pisa, graduating in law in 1726 and teaching Civil Law there from 1731. His life was devoted to the study of law and the early records of the city and university. .see full details

A delightful miniature almanac, which is preceded by several popular songs (‘Aux Dames’, ‘le Portraits’, ‘le Banquet’,‘la Barque à Caron’ etc.) Though without imprint, this is characteristic of the popular miniatures produced by Marcilly..see full details

A delightful edition in ‘petit format’ by Valade, who pioneered the format before it was made ubiquitous by his successor Cazin.more...

The Londres and Liège imprints, of course, are false (Le petit format, Paris, 1878). The Contes moraux had first appeared individually in the Mercure, with a collected edition of 1761. The plates in our Valade edition are well-executed reductions of the Gravelot plates found in the first illustrated edition of 1763..see full details